Bestiary

by Robert Masello

  And it didn’t look as if Carter was going to be in the mood for a barbecue. He must have flopped onto the bed and fallen asleep.

  As she carried Joey upstairs, she noted that Carter still hadn’t turned on any of the lights. She went into Joey’s bedroom, changed him, and left him in his crib, then crossed the hall to the master suite.

  “Carter?” she said softly, stepping into the darkened room. She’d expected to see him lying on the bed, damp from a shower. But no one was there. And there was a fragrance in the air—the scent of a forest, after a heavy rain—that made her stop in her tracks. It was the scent she remembered from New York, from the terrible and difficult days preceding Joey’s birth. The days when their lives had been shadowed, even endangered, by the malevolence of a creature who went by the name of Arius.

  She fumbled for the light switch and turned it on. The bed was unrumpled, the room was empty.

  But the bathroom door was closed.

  She put her ear to it and, holding her breath, listened for any sound within. There was a low swishing sound, of the plastic shower curtain crackling. “Carter?” she said, still hoping against hope that she would hear him answer.

  But there was nothing.

  She tried the handle; the door was unlocked. She opened it slowly, and yes, the shower curtain was billowing in the breeze from the open window. At dusk, a wind often came up off the valley below. But no one was in the stall.

  Only the scent of wet leaves—more powerful here than it had been in the bedroom—suggested that someone might have been in here.

  Someone who might even have exited, moments before, by the open window.

  Downstairs, she could hear the sound of the front door opening.

  “Honey?” Carter called out; she could hear his backpack hitting the floor of the foyer. “Guess who I brought home for dinner?”

  “You decent?” Del called out. “’Cause if not, come on down!”

  Beth closed the bathroom window tight, then stepped back into the bedroom.

  “She must be upstairs with Joey,” she heard Carter saying to Del. “There’s beer in the fridge; help yourself.”

  Carter came up the steps two at a time, and when Beth turned to him, she knew he could tell something was wrong.

  And then the scent must have hit him, too, because he quickly took her in his arms and looked all around. “You alright? Joey alright?”

  She nodded.

  Then he ran to the nursery, and came back with Joey nestled against his shoulder.

  “When did this happen?” he asked. “Just now?”

  “Yes. Right before you came home.”

  “Did you . . . see him?”

  “No.” She shuddered involuntarily. “It was only that smell.”

  He didn’t have to ask how Arius might have gotten in. They both knew that he could come and go wherever he pleased. And now they knew something more—that whatever their hopes, and their suspicions, had been, he was still a presence in this world. And in their lives.

  “You mind if I have one of the expensive foreign brews?” Del shouted up from the foot of the stairs. “I don’t normally drink a beer that had to come all the way from Holland.”

  “Have whatever you want,” Carter answered, still holding the baby and looking deep into Beth’s eyes; they didn’t have to say a word for each of them to know exactly what the other was thinking.

  Little Joey looked from one to the other, with his usual expression—so incongruous for a toddler—of placid understanding.

  “I should have called ahead,” Carter murmured. “To tell you about Del.”

  Beth shrugged; she was used to Carter bringing home his buddies. At one time it had been Joe Russo—the baby’s namesake. Now it was Del.

  “And when do I get to see the kid?” Del called out. “God knows I didn’t come all the way up here just to hang out with Carter some more.”

  Carter put his free arm around Beth’s shoulders and shepherded his family toward the stairs.

  Del was waiting at the bottom, one hand on top of Champ’s head and the other holding a Heineken. “Now you’re talkin’,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ALTHOUGH REGGlE STlLL had the envelope that that other security guard, the one who’d shown up with Stan Sadowski, had given him, he’d already spent the fifty bucks. Sadowski had once handed him a Free Drink coupon for a place called the Blue Bayou, and after the free drink Reggie had used the money for a lap dance.

  As for the envelope, he’d been waiting for the right opportunity to give it to Mr. al-Kalli himself—he’d read in a book on personal improvement that if you wanted to get ahead, you needed to make sure that you got on the boss’s radar—but he just hadn’t found it. Once the car had sped out so fast he could barely get the gate up in time, and the last few times al-Kalli must have come in and out by the back gate, over near the riding ring.

  But tonight looked like it was going to be his night—the headlights of the Mercedes limo were approaching fast, up the hill, and Reggie dug the envelope out of his pocket. A couple of times he’d debated steaming it open and seeing what was inside, but he was afraid that al-Kalli would be able to figure out what he’d done. And from everything he’d heard, al-Kalli was one dude you didn’t want to mess with. Just those frickin’ peacocks alone, with their screeching and squawking, was enough to give him the willies at night.

  As the car pulled up, Reggie stepped out of the gatehouse and raised a hand at Jakob, the driver. The tinted window rolled smoothly down, and Reggie said, “I have something for Mr. al-Kalli.”

  Always deal with the boss himself, never a middleman—that’s what the advice book had said.

  “Give it to me,” Jakob said, holding his hand palm out.

  Reggie tried to look into the back of the limo, but it was so dark in there he couldn’t see a damn thing.

  “My instructions were to—”

  Jakob opened the door and Reggie had to step back just to get out of the way.

  “Give it to me, whatever it is. Now.”

  Jakob towered over him, his eyes as black as his shirt.

  Reggie handed it over, and Jakob turned it back and forth in his hand. “Who brought this?”

  “One of the Silver Bear Security guys.”

  “When?”

  “Um, I don’t know exactly when.” He didn’t want to admit that he hadn’t found a way to give it to al-Kalli immediately. “Maybe a day or so ago.”

  “And it took you till now to hand it over?”

  Reggie wasn’t sure what to say. What would that self-improvement book tell him to do?

  Jakob got back in the car, and as the gates swung open, he said through the still open window, “What time do you get off tonight?”

  “Six A.M.”

  “Don’t come back tomorrow.”

  The car took off, and Reggie stood there, flat-footed, so long the gates nearly hit him when they closed again.

  AT THE HOUSE, al-Kalli waited patiently in the kitchen while Jakob held the envelope up to the light, sniffed it for plastique, shook it gently for anthrax powder or any other substance. There was no return address, but that was to be expected. Jakob let some water collect in the kitchen sink, then opened the envelope just above it, ready to drop it and hit the disposal button in a second.

  “It’s probably nothing,” al-Kalli said, impatiently.

  Jakob thought he was probably right, and he carefully opened the envelope at one end, then drew out the single, typed page inside. He saw the salutation—a simple Mr. al-Kalli—and several brief paragraphs below it. There was a scrawled signature at the bottom, and below it the words Capt. Derek Greer. He made a small “huh.”

  “What is it?” al-Kalli said, taking the letter Jakob was now extending to him.

  “It’s from the one you hired, the American soldier, in Iraq.”

  Al-Kalli took a pair of gold reading glasses from the breast pocket of his suit coat and put them on. “He knows I’m here?” al-
Kalli said, as he began to read.

  Jakob didn’t reply, but simply waited. Still, just watching al-Kalli’s face told him most of what he needed to know.

  In less than a minute, al-Kalli had put his glasses back in his pocket, folded up the letter again, and said, “We may have a small problem.”

  Jakob knew that when Mohammed said small, he meant large.

  “What would you like me to do?”

  Al-Kalli looked thoughtful. “We must first have a word with Rashid.”

  A few minutes later, they found him where he always was—in the bestiary.

  But al-Kalli, already in a black mood, only grew blacker as the doors whooshed shut behind him.

  The odor in the air was unhealthy, the cries of the animals strained and plaintive. Rashid himself, in a soiled lab coat, was playing a hose over the mottled hide of the basilisk. When he saw his employer, he quickly shut off the water and came forward, drying his hands on the tails of his coat.

  “Mr. al-Kalli,” he said, but before he could say another word, al-Kalli had backhanded him, hard, across the mouth. His sapphire ring cracked against a tooth.

  Rashid fell against the bars of a cage, and the creature within suddenly sprang upward, spittle flying in all directions.

  Al-Kalli grabbed the spindly Rashid by the collar of his coat and dragged him clear. Rashid, in terror, simply slumped to the ground.

  “Who have you been talking to?” al-Kalli hissed, and Rashid’s eyes went wide.

  “No one,” he sputtered; there was blood smeared like lipstick across his mouth.

  Al-Kalli drew back his hand and smacked him again, so hard Rashid’s head spun on his neck.

  “Someone knows about the animals.”

  “I have never . . . told anyone.”

  “Someone has seen the animals.”

  Now Jakob knew how serious the problem had become.

  “Who have you let in here?”

  “No one . . . only Bashir. To clean.”

  Bashir was a teenage boy, one step above an idiot, whom Rashid had brought from the bombed-out ruins of Mosul. He barely spoke, lived in a shed behind the bestiary, and was a virtual slave.

  “Who besides Bashir?”

  Rashid simply shook his head, in terror and denial. “No one ever comes here . . . unless it is to . . .” He didn’t know how to complete that sentence, nor did he want to. The only other people who came here were prisoners, men al-Kalli planned to feed to the beasts. Was he about to become one of them? Rashid thought. Words of the Koran began to tumble like a fast-moving stream through his head.

  Al-Kalli threw him away, like something soiled, and Rashid sprawled on the dirt floor of the bestiary. He knew enough not to get up; it was better to lie prostrate, submissive, defeated; it was true among the animals, and it was true among men.

  Al-Kalli’s gaze, filled with contempt and disgust, moved away from him. The scent of blood in the air, however slight, had agitated the animals. There were grunts and snarls, and overhead the furious beating of wings. As al-Kalli watched, his prized phoenix dropped off its lofty perch and swooped in a blaze of red and gold into the air, screeching like a whole flock of eagles. It flew madly from one end of the vast facility to the other, the tips of its glistening wings grazing the steel walls, its claws extended and flexing as if anxious to capture some living prey.

  The other animals, watching its flight and perhaps envying the bird’s relative freedom, let loose with a louder volley of howls and yelps and growls. There was a dense, musky smell in the air, and even Jakob instinctively loosened his jacket enough to make drawing his gun easier.

  What was he to do? al-Kalli wondered, as the cries rose around him. His beasts were dying—the legacy of his family, for thousands of years, was about to vanish under his care. Under difficult circumstances, he had saved as many as he could, as many as he thought necessary to breed and sustain the species. But he was failing. Rashid was a fool, and, despite all his training, no more capable of caring for such exquisite treasures than the idiot boy, Bashir. These were creatures from a time before time, beasts that had walked among the dinosaurs, that had grazed the fields of Eden. It would be a risk—it would always be a risk—to share the knowledge of them with anyone.

  But what was needed, al-Kalli saw more clearly now than ever before, was someone who knew that world. Someone who understood creatures of such great antiquity—someone who revered them as he did—and who might intuit what they needed to survive.

  And if such a man existed, al-Kalli knew who it might be.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CARTER BENT LOW over the plaster of paris and with the tip of his scalpel delicately removed a piece the size of a dime.

  “Neatly done,” Del said, taking a sip of his cold coffee. “At this rate we’ll be finished by Labor Day.”

  “What year?” Carter said, straightening up and, with his hands at the small of his back, stretching.

  Del glanced up at the clock on the wall of the lab. “It’s almost ten. How much longer you want to go?”

  Carter wasn’t sure. They were working on the remains of the La Brea Man, and they were doing it in the public lab on the ground floor of the Page Museum. This was the lab where the work was routinely done, behind a curved glass wall that allowed the general public, during normal museum hours, to watch the process. But these weren’t normal museum hours, which was the only reason Carter was willing to risk using this lab at all. Working on something as sensitive as the La Brea Man—given all the controversy it had already created—was probably something he should be doing only in a place safe from public view.

  It was just that the museum had no better lab than this.

  “You getting tired?” Carter asked.

  “I can go a while longer,” Del said, tucking some strands of his long white hair back into his headband. “Long as we’re not interrupted by any ghosts.”

  “I haven’t seen any yet.” But then, it would hardly be possible; they were working in a tiny island of light, in an otherwise dark and empty lab, in the middle of an otherwise dark and empty museum. Carter, too, had heard the rumors Del was referring to; the night watchmen had reported some strange goings-on. Moving shadows on the wall. Scratching noises. Once, some violent banging in the sub-basement. As far as Carter was concerned, either it was nothing at all or it was something the protestors were up to. Maybe they thought they could spook the museum into giving up the bones.

  If that was the case, they were sorely mistaken.

  Especially as he was making such notable progress on the bones of the left hand—the hand in which something, something still encased in the asphalt, was held. In fact, with another few moves of the chisel and scalpel, he thought he could separate the object from the hand itself.

  “Put another tape on, and we’ll work for the duration of one side.”

  Del turned and popped the Loretta Lynn out of the boom box balanced on the next stool. “What do you want to hear?”

  “Something with electric guitars and no whining. The Stones, the White Stripes, the Vibes.”

  “I brought some Merle Haggard. Boxed set—Down Every Road?”

  Carter laughed. “If that’s what you’ve got.”

  And then he went back to work on the hand, while Del, on the opposite side of the lab table, continued removing flakes of plaster from the occipital lobe of the skull. During the day, the bones were carefully concealed under a black plastic sheath, but for several nights now, Carter and Del had taken to working on them for another hour or two after closing time. They hadn’t ever gone this long, but as the skeleton became more and more revealed, Carter’s compulsion to continue the work had grown. Beth, he knew, was less than enthused about his longer hours, but he promised her it would be over soon. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t run into this kind of problem with him before.

  He tapped the side of the plaster on what appeared to be the little finger of the man’s left hand, and a tiny fissure opened up. He tilted the tensor l
amp to give himself a better view, and yes, he could see that there was now a tiny, barely discernible line running between the bone and the still-coated object. If he was very careful, and a little bit lucky, he would now be able to separate the two.

  “You getting along any better with your brother-in-law?” Carter asked. Del was still staying with them in their fancy condo on Wilshire Boulevard.

  “As long as I stay out on the balcony, they’re okay with it and so am I.”

  “The traffic noise doesn’t get to you?” Carter used a fine camel’s-hair brush to whisk away the plaster dust.

  “They’re on the twenty-ninth floor,” Del replied, without looking up from his work either. “I get more noise from the planes. But no, it’s not ideal. I’m looking for new accommodations.”

  Carter picked up the scalpel once more and gently increased the delineation between the bone and its prize. Merle was singing, in a rich baritone—Carter had to hand him that—about how all his friends were gonna be strangers.

  “You up for another hike this weekend?” Del said.

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe we can go somewhere they don’t slash your tires.”

  “That would be a good idea.” After their last hike in Temescal Canyon, they’d had to wait an hour in the parking lot for a tow truck to arrive. And Carter had had to shell out for a new set of tires.

  He used the scalpel as a wedge, and just as the plaster cracked, and the bone and object cleaved apart, the overhead lights all over the lab snapped on.

  “What the hell is going on in here?” Carter heard from the door directly behind him.

  He didn’t have to turn around to know who it was.

  Gunderson, in a natty suit and bow tie, was standing in the doorway, with a red boutonniere in his lapel. Del quickly turned off the music.

  “Do you know what time it is?” Gunderson went on.

  Carter knew perfectly well. But what, he wondered, as he draped a clean cloth over the newly separated object, was Gunderson doing here?

  “I was just leaving a concert downtown,” he volunteered before Carter could ask, “and in view of all the security problems we’ve had of late, I thought I’d swing by.” He strode over to the table. “And I’m very glad I did.”